“Hearts Live By Being Wounded”
― Oscar Wilde
I know the pain of wanting and the pain of losing.
I think we all do. But -
With heart-ache, heart-ease.
With release, room for more.
With acceptance, room for exhalation.
I love this image, I love blood, I love hurt. I am macabre, absolutely. I love pain from that deepest part of oneself that can hardly be explained, can hardly even be pinned down. Like a dream, it dissolves the more I try to hold it still. Obsessively, I study darkness in a flawed attempt to cage it.
The pain of my wounds bubbles in me like a spell waiting to be cast.
Right now I'm waiting for a call to take in my next foster babe -
there's a lot of hurt in the waiting, a lot of memories unbidden and constant.
The teeth of my spine curve into a crooked, sharpened smile.
I have the backbone for this.
"Hearts Live by Being Wounded" self-portrait, July 2021
Available as a print + and part of the larger series, "Night Terrors", through:
www.joanneartmangallery.com
“Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom
